Mint.com email glitch leaves unanswered questions

David Gomez, 15th October 2010

A number of Mint.com users were recently surprised to find blank e-mails in their inboxes which originated from a Mint.com support address. The immediate fear amongst members was that the mass e-mailing may have been prompted by an unreported security breach.

The financial management website, which is owned by Intuit Inc. has apologized for the 11 million e-mails which were only sent to some of the 4 million users. Mint said on their customer support site that the e-mails only went out late Tuesday night.

Many users have said that they do not buy Mint’s explanation.

Some Mint.com users have said that their e-mail accounts have been hit multiple times with the same blank message. One commenter even said that their e-mail address had been hit nine times that morning.

It gets even weirder too.

While most commenters have said that their e-mails were blank, there are a few who have received different e-mails. There are a few users who had e-mails that contained HTML in them.

At least two people have reported receiving e-mails with HTML in them. One of these users who said that they think Mint’s explanation seemed "a little bogus" did a little research on the domain in their e-mail and came up with a name and contact information.

Keep in mind Mint is a free service that allows people to manage their spending online using a set of tools to track trends in their financial habits. To do this users have to enter their banking and financial information so the software can do the number crunching for the user.

Quite a few people received multiple e-mails, most of them were blank and a few had HTML in them? With all of this going on you can see why there may be some worry from tech geeks about there being a security breach.

So the question is: what the hell happened?

As of now, Mint has not given users a detailed enough explanation as to why this weird e-mail bomb was set off. The "official" public relations response is that it was an error with some testing related to a new service Mint will soon be offering.

Supposedly Mint is readying a new service or a feature of some kind for their users. When they do this they send a mass e-mail to all of their users letting them know about this new service they can use.

According to Mint’s PR people someone checked the wrong box on an e-mail application and boom! A weird ass e-mail was sent to very confused and concerned customers.

Hopefully, this whole e-mail situation is just a goof by some tech guy. Of course, users feel like the situation was could have been handled better. Obviously, nobody likes to be kept in the dark when the people who monitor their money might have had a computer security breach.